timeeye.jpg“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

— Søren Aaby Kierkegaard

It’s a good thing, you see, that the clocks went back this weekend. There has been a kind of temporal shift in my life since the 2nd opinion visit with the oncology team last week. Getting such a definitive “All Clear!” prognosis has blown a lot of anxiety out of my life and left, in its place, something like excitement, clarity and momentum.

Cancer stopped time in my life. Or to put it more specifically, It had the impact of waving a strong magnet over a compass. All the persistent and reliable frames of reference in my life imploded, right there, in the moment of a singular articulation {CANCER} in the phone call by my GP while I sat in the Edmonton airport, trying to come home.

It’s very symbolic, of course, to have a major course deviation while trying to “come home”. But really, since April, I have been trying to move forward in a universe where what had previously seemed solid melted into an unhelpful fluidity and internally, what had felt reliable was then rather universally unhinged. And time was a central marker of this newfound and extremely unpleasant altered state.

Trauma theorists have written extensively about the impact of trauma on temporality. One of the most consistent observations in this exciting and profound academic domain, is that within the space of trauma, experience is not attached to temporality in somatically or ontologically familiar ways. In the “after” space of trauma, time seems impenetrable. It is as if time has been frozen, or happening someplace else. And so people do things like, revisit the “scene of the crime” in order to attempt, once again, from a different vantage point, to pry open the arrested time of a traumatic experience so as to re-enter the space of trauma and make it somehow narratologically accessible, manipulable, finally.

For a week now, I have felt elated and oddly, familiar to myself again while being absolutely confident that nothing is the same. After about six months of profound insomnia, I am sleeping like a baby. I have just spent five long languorous days that were fun, and without much planning, lists or purpose. If you know me, you will know that the absence of lists and organization is a rather extraordinary developmental shift. And this is not, I must emphasize, an “I learned an important lesson from cancer” feel-good story. All I know is that I am, once again, moving. And I know that my points of reference once again, make sense. Like time.

Something is profoundly altered in my universe. For one thing, I am taking chances that I would never have ventured before. This is especially true in the social realm. A few days ago, I stood in a friend’s kitchen and told her exactly what were the fears that had placed such a stringent limitation on our relationship. At a party this weekend, I walked straight up to a rather daunting woman who I didn’t know, and engaged her in conversation. I am excited about life. I am engaged with life. I am in love, again, with life itself!